Tuesday, June 27, 2017

At last, the color portion of my promised Hill oeuvre, celebrating the mountain of Hills now available on Blu-ray, framing the golden question of whether Hill "gets" women or just loves them - whatever the difference is, and if a single filmography can answer it. Thanks to great work of the mighty Arrow video, and Scorpion releasing; most everything Hill did is on Blu-ray or at least DVD (see part one of this series, the Hill black and white era). Next to the great JC, he's the premiere Hawksian of the drive-in era. Cherish him.

The following have always been in print and written about quite a bit, largely due (I think) to Quentin Tarantino and Pam Grier, so just a quick pass through of their pros and cons as I have mixed feelings about them.

PART II: THE GRIER YEARS

THE BIG DOLL HOUSE
(1971) ***

Made during the Philippine film industry boom (a time when life--that of stunt men, crews, and extras-- was cheap), when Corman's New World youth brigade (Hill, Hellman, etc.) operated down there like a bunch of film school Col. Kurtzes, BIG DOLL HOUSE updates of the Women in Prison genre for a new 'sexually free' generation. Shoring off the 50s gang deb's big hair for straight and blonde straight or big black beautiful afros, trading switchblades for machetes, and adding erotic nudity, lesbian amor (as opposed to just suggesting it via some lip-smacking bull-dyke guards), horniness, political upheaval, nymphomania, opiate withdrawal, sisterhood, corruption, systemic sadism (The infamous Stanford Experiment was conducted the same year), xenophobia (racism), and existential ennui. Using the foreign locale to its advantage, it also plays up first world fear of of being a tourist in the third world and caught up the gears of penal corruption and injustice. If that wasn't rough enough for you: Hill stock character actor Sid Haig shows up in a sombrero. Wherever Hill is there, so too the wildman Haig. It is written.

The cast is a veritable All-Stars of New World hottie talent, not only introducing Pam Grier (as the lesbian) but Judy Brown (as the newbie); Pat GIRLFRIENDS Woodell (as the guerrilla); Roberta Collins (as the tough blonde); and Brooke Mills (as the strung-out junkie). They'd all be playing nurses, strippers, thieves, or feminists (sometimes all four at once) all through the New World 70s drive-in canon. Here they race cockroaches, fight in the mud, shower, and get it on while the sadistic head guard (Kathryn Loder, left) conducts nightly torture sessions for the pleasure of the mysterious Colonel Mendoza (the kind of character who watches from behind two-way screens --only his cigarette holder and riding crop discernible in silhouette). Eventually the girls escape, guns blazing, and all hell breaking loose as they race to join the rebels. Blazing a path through the jungles, wreaking euphoric vengeance! Libertad! Wait, what country is this supposed to be again?

Pros: Despite the copious grime and odious abuse, Hill keeps a nice pro-feminist stance (though the final shot is a downer for sure). Some cathartic violence during the escape; sexy star wattage from a roster of capable talent in their prime; Grier's dynamite song "99 Years."

Cons; The Philippines never look good on film to me -- that vegetation just feels claustrophobically damp, the vegetation waxy and a thin sheen of sweat over everyone and everything, flat gray-white sky outdoor days both hot humid and oppressive even out of doors, with ugly buildings and the ghosts of horrible Japanese soldiers still haunting bullet-ridden ruins, and so forth (PS 5/2018: I've since changed my mind- it depends on the restoration / transfer - the island looks great on the new Blu-ray of The Bat People). Some of the torture is unpalatable (like that 'swirly' trick Hill's so fond of). Still, *** because for what and where it is, it's damned solid.

THE BIG BIRD CAGE

(1972) **1/2

The Doll House was such a hit that Hill and Grier had to go back to the Philippines and crank out another; this time there's more comedy, more rebels, and a bigger budget (a whole summer camp-style compound is blown up, searing even the celluloid). Now the showers and catfights are outdoors on muddy sloping hills, which is slightly less depressing, and there's even more of a revolutionary angle as Grier's boyfriend is rebel leader Sid Haig, and the plan is to get his lonely rebel troops some girlfriends by liberating the women's work camp. That's all fine, but the real selling point is the the amazingly slender-hipped huge-haired mega-babe Anitra Ford as a free-spirited nymphomaniac named Tory, whose bedding of important political figures has landed her 'on ice.' She becomes Grier's sparring/bonding partner and helps blast their way to freedom. I dug this the first time I saw it with my socialist rebel Argentine espousa (when I was working as a film critic covering the New World canon for the Muse); I didn't like it the second, alone and disheveled.

Pros: Grier and Ford are both dynamite with their bad attitudes and skimpy prison attire (Ford may have the best mid-riff in the history of the genre - though she's not in the above pic) and this go-round Hill is much more about escape, sisterhood, and machine gunning your way to freedom, than he is about seeing women tortured (though there's plenty of that too - alas). Grier and Ford are a great team, and--even though he's rocking a misplaced accent--Haig's the man.

Cons: It's a personal thing, but I find the sweaty Filipino foliage claustrophobic in its visible sweaty humidity. The gay mincing guards (the film's most dated element) are much too flouncy, and there's a wearying amount of suffering and abuse prior to the revolt. Me, I like ten pounds of vengeance to an ounce of provocation, not vice versa. As with the next two films, Hill seems to get meaner the second time he covers the same ground (venting subconscious anger at Corman for trying to pigeonhole him?)

COFFY

(1973) - ***1/2

Grier rocketed to stardom as the queen of blaxploitation films with this big cult hit-- capably stepping out from her ensemble work in the Philippine prisons and into the big leagues. She's a hardworking nurse out to avenge her smack-addicted 11-year-old sister by waging a one-woman war on Los Angeles' drug/prostitution racket after her cop friend Carter (William Elliott) is beaten up for not being crooked. First step: go undercover as a high-class Jamaican prostitute for King George (Robert Doqui), a super mack-daddy pimp with big-time heroin connections. Grier's white bathing suit is divine, her body bedazzling, her cape delicious (she has a cool cape with her nurse's uniform, too), her hair huge, her accent hilarious (in a good way, mon). King George as a cape too, and a scepter in addition to the requisite feather in his hat. What's up with capes in this film? Who cares, we love it. But then old King George is being dragged from behind an Oldsmobile by Arab henchman Sid Haig while Coffy swims up further and further up the sleazy heroin dealing/prostitution pipeline looking for Mr. Big. If it all starts to get too grimy and Diane Arbus-style ugly/heroin despairing, Diane's real-life husband, Allan, shows up as a sleazy sheik to put it all in grungy perspective. MASH fans are bound to be pleasantly unnerved by the sight of their beloved shrink Sidney laying back on a bed trying to be sensual while beckoning Coffy unto him saying, "come here, I'm going to hurt you." Booker Bradshaw is Coffy's tall, dark, and handsome politician boyfriend, whose slick-ass roadster is so low he has to step down to get into it. Through it all, Grier keeps her character tough and glamorous and always holding onto her sensitive center, even when wielding a sawed-off shotgun.

It's temporarily good to be the 'King'

Cons: The Olive Blu-ray is barebones and in its widescreen HD reveals something not as immediately apparent on VHS, just how cheap the sets on this movie are, something the full screen VHS I used to have obscured. Here we can see the far edges of the cheap plywood walls in mid-warp/decay from the swampy heat of the soundstage lights; every surface has that sad "under construction" look. The bars and apartments have an airless, sweaty claustrophobia, as if black people can't afford air conditioning. As for the actors --their wigs appear crooked and misshapen, their make-up runny; it's like a giant basement of Arbusian freaks (or was I just really strung out on cough medicine last time I watched it?); even the outdoor scenes have an existentially oppressed vibe. And just because he's a pimp doesn't really mean King George (above) deserves to be betrayed and dragged around behind a car like Angelo in WILD BUNCH, or the fellow stable whores deserve to be all cut up or otherwise abused so Coffy can get her vengeance. She's just slumming but this is how they make their damned living!

Pros: In the end, though, none of that shit matters, because that score by Roy Ayers is so damned funky, so tight, so on point, and sounds so full and badass in the Blu-ray digital that if you watch this with the stereo connected, you'll be blown well clear of all tawdry visuals. And despite the bad wig factor, the actors are sublime: Grier, especially, is in a class by herself. And, more tellingly, the tawdry atmosphere works to make all the heroin addiction--that longing for release--perfectly understandable. Hill can't convey the way an arm full of opiates can make a heaven of ghetto hell, but he sure has a handle on the look and feel of withdrawal. The whole COFFY mise-en-scene seems as if its an aesthetic reflection of a crucifixion cruise, i.e. the endless slog through pain and despair that makes you so desperate for release, you'll sell your soul to the first buyer.

And there's a badass catfight between Coffy and another girl at one of King George's cocktail parties, where we learn Coffy keeps razor blades up there in her weave. Nice!

Paid homage to by directors from Spike Lee to Quentin Tarantino, this is the title Pam Grier is known for/by even though it's COFFY they're thinking of. Originally set to be a sequel, here Grier is a tougher, more jaded and bitter version of her same vigilante character, as if all her killing from the previous film only made the ghetto streets even worse. Drugs and gang violence have so destroyed her neighborhood that when her undercover cop boyfriend (Terry Cotter) is gunned down in the middle of the afternoon, no one comes forward as a witness. Her skittery junky brother (Antonio "Huggy Bear" Fargas) might know who did it, though and so--uniting with a local "neighborhood action" group--Foxy goes undercover as a call girl for the neighborhood's drug czar/madame played by the charisma-deprived Kathryn Loder to get the goods on the whole operation.

Eventually Foxy travels as far as the poppy fields of the Philippines (where else?) in her quest, but all she finds are rapists, forced heroin injections (which is always--it seems--how the bad guys get the girls submissive, uninhibited and dependent) and barely enough revenge to pay back the catalogue of wrongs. Highlights include a lesbian bar brawl and Foxy's sexual belittling of an old white judge--but even that goes sour when the girl she encourages to participate (Sally-Ann Stroud) winds up tortured and murdered after Foxy leaves. How emblematic of America's involvement in third world power struggles!

Pros: A great lengthy rattletrap scene of Foxy shaking down a junky lesbian, who's afraid her dyke girlfriend is going to come home from work and find her with another woman, a clear influence on "The Bonnie Situation" in PULP FICTION (which had Grier in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo as Bonnie). Grier rocks insane afros and gorgeous-slick outfits; there's a badass lesbian bar brawl; the crazily colored opening credits feature Grier boogying down in all sorts of super-sexy outfits to the Willie Hutch theme.

Best of all, of course that Hutch funk score. Dynamite, sheer dynamite. As with Roy Ayers score on COFFY, worth the price of admission all by itself. If you watch it, crank it, subwoofers blaring, neighbors be damned.

Cons: Way too much screen time is spent watching Loder sadistically abuse her girls and dote on her pretty boy gigolo and not nearly enough watching Grier kick the shit out of people. Even more so than COFFY there's way too much urban blight, sexual abuse, and aesthetic degradation. Foxy seems to think turning tricks, getting shot up, raped, harassed, shot at, and leaving the people who help her to be tortured or killed, is small price to pay for --what? Does she get anything for her troubles? SPOILER ALERT: She doesn't even kill the evil Loder at the end, as if Loder's endless ugly egotistical sadism--which by then has grown as soul-crushingly wearisome as that of Alan Ormsby in CHILDREN SHOUDLDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGs or Michael Gambon's Peter Grant-ish thug in THE COOK, THE THIEF, THE WIFE AND HER LOVER--death wouldn't be enough (thoug it would be a damn sight more satisfying to us). This was Hill's last in the subgenre anyway. Urgh! It's been almost 20 years, and I'm still mad. Maybe I should see it again. But life is short and even more sensitive now than I was. Can you tell?

PART 3: Centaur and SORCERESS

Hill would break out from Corman's wing a bit for his next film, to form Centaur Releasing with John Prizer, for which he'd bang out two quick punchy films in the female ensemble vein: one would rake in a small fortune; the next would lose it. After a lengthy hiatus he went back to Corman for one more film, would fight a bit with him one time too many and then that would be it. Well, how else do you graduate from the Corman school unless it's to fight with him about some creative issue and off you trundle, into either the abyss or the big time? Sadly, Hill's disinclination to work in direct-to-video or TV led to him doing just zero more films after that. He's still around though! Never say never.

THE SWINGING CHEERLEADERS

(1974) - ***

Following the tried-true three girls at work-and-play ensemble formula, this brings Hill's cunning mix of sexy feminism, cathartic violence, deadpan wit, and covert liberal politics to bear in a sexy comedy-drama form. Radical journalism major Kate (Jo Johnston) goes undercover to expose outdated mores and institutionalized sexism within the college's football cheerleading team, but instead she finds she these girls are cool, while her wild-eyed radical underground newspaper editor boyfriend Ross (Ric Carrott) who's a rapey dick. Besides, the handsome quarterback Buck is played by Ron Hajek, his teeth white and straight enough he's worth stealing from the bitchy, manipulative cheerleader squad captain Mary Ann (Colleen Camp). Sulky Ross takes out his anger by publishing Kate's expose (after she tried to scrap it) and then, later, inviting his sicko friends over to "break in" the virgin cheerleader (the doe-eyed Rainbeaux Smith). Mary Ann's dad, the dean of the school, is meanwhile embroiled in a plot to "fix" the big game, along with the coach, and a black professor (Jason Sommers) who is having an affair with the black cheerleader (Rosanne Keaton, one of Playboy's first black centerfolds).

Pros: Hill keeps the action flowing in surprising ways. I'll confess I have a low skeeve threshold when rapey idiots start snickering and egging each other on like so many dickweeds needing their graves spit on (like in the odious misogyny benchmark PORKY'S). So I like that here the jocks are sensitive and serious and the radical underground journalist is the swine. (Hill reports that a Texas audience one burst out of the seats applauding when the jock beats up Ross- so did I!)

Cons: I liked it the first time I saw it, and kind of fell for Johnston in those shorts. Now, a decade or so later, she just terrifies me--those eyes seem wild and unhinged, the mouth grinding as if from a line of badly-cut coke snorted fifteen years ago but still lodged behind her eyeballs. (Am I just talking about myself? I guess that's what they call 'maturity.')

I know it goes without mentioning in a more enlightened era, but what sticks out now isn't that there's a black main character --there were more than a few at the time (as in 1970s' BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS and all the New World nurse movies) but that it's a reminder of the miscegenation taboo that no black woman and white man (or vice versa) can ever be attracted to each other in these movies, so if you're black woman at a predominately white school, there will be one or two black men showing up, and you'll be bound to have an affair with one or both. As a kid in the 70s I wondered if that was just some instinctual thing - like black people don't find whites attractive, genetically, and vice-versa. Now of course I know the truth (racist southern distributors would never show it) but in today's enlightened time, it actually seems conspicuous: there are three black people in the cast: one is a homewrecker, one a no-good cheater, and the other a knife-wielding maniac. And they're all, so to speak, in bed together.

Pros: The black professor has a ferocious tough-as-shit black wife (Mae Mercer), who drops in on our terrified cheerleader in the film's most surprising powerful scene--even if you've never been verbally threatened by your lovers' spouse--either by knife-point or just over the phone--then you too will get a queasy pit of your stomach thrill. I've been on all sides of that equation and let me tell you, Hill gets it right and Mercer is a powerhouse never losing our sympathy even as we're terrified to the point of shitting our finest cheerleader slacks. As for the 'sweet one,' Rainbeaux Smith glows with a mix of doll innocence and angel sublime grace; she was pregnant at the time (as we learn in the Arrow Blu-ray's generous extras). I like too how Hill doesn't even bother with the big climactic game at the end, nor even deign to mask the terrible emulsion damage and faded color on his stock footage (is there even a single football?)

Cons: The main thing I can't stand about it all though, is the Scott Joplin rag underscoring the big climactic brawl at the warehouse. It's aged... not well, and that kind of corny silent film comedy ragtime jazz nonsense hangs anachronistically around all through New World nurse and AIP's beach party catalogues, even in The Trip! So I'm sorry Hill had to lug it with him.

Blu-ray: The Arrow restoration is surprisingly only so-so as far as some colors being restored (lots of glowing greens) but it still seems very bleached out. I'm sure they did the best they could, but expectations are so high after the beauty of Spider Baby and Pit-Stop.

SWITCHBLADE SISTERS

(1975) Dir. Jack Hill
****

SPIDER BABY's my favorite Hill but this is the second, a complex but highly re-watchable tale of feminism, street violence, and short-shorts. Doll-faced, sweet voiced, crazy-eyed Robbie Lee, is Lace, leader of the gang, the 'Dagger Debs.' New girl in town Maggie (Joanne Nail) is the newcomer, and not adverse to whipping her chain belt and/or grabbing a switchblade to defend herself at the burger place. Lace's one-eyed Iago, Patch (Monica Gale), sees the writing on the wall re: her beta status. Lace just thinks Patch is jealous of Maggie's cool gutsy charm, but ole Patch is right. Not only that, there are the sparks between Lace's boyfriend, the Daggers' leader, Dom (Ashner Brauner, doing a great Ralph Meeker impression), and Maggie. Even his breaking into her room to rape her can't change that, nor Lace getting pregnant and getting all gooey about raising the baby, to which he snorts and tosses her cash for an abortion.

Pros: a big roller rink massacre; an attack coordinated with a feminist black militant coalition, with machine guns and a badass armored Cadillac; the heavenly blonde Daryl Hannah jawline of Janice Karman as Bunny; the badass 70s funk score; some great hair and dialogue and a lightning pace. See it when you're super furious at the world or just strung out with the shakes because your dealer never showed, and bask in the cathartic anger, the fabulous legs of Joanne Nail, and the way Robbie Lee's eyes widen and dilate, then contract into a glowing glaze when she talks. Savor too Nail's final rant to the fat cop, her face streaked with blood, eyes wide and maniacal, a shocking Cagney-by-way-of Lorre raving moment (maybe my favorite ending in all schlock cinema).

Joanne Nail would be back all right... in the fascinating 70s all-purpose drive-in capstone, THE VISITOR! (1979) Not much else, alas. Oh that this had 20 sequels. (Fuller review here).

SORCERESS

(1982) Dir. Jack Hill

***

Wild-eyed sorcerer Traigon (Roberto "the Mexican Martin Holden Wiener" Ballesteros - who really knows how to swirl his blazing red cape) needs to sacrifice his firstborn child to his crazy Reptile goddess to keep his magic strong, but his hot young wife (Silvia Manríquez) has twin girls and won't tell him which one came first (if he gets the order wrong, he's screwed). A wild-haired noble wizard strides forth to zap Traigon into a 20 year-long period of oblivion, but too late to save the mom from Traigon's swordy pique. Naturally, the wizard brings the orphaned twin girls to a farmer off in the wild to raise in secret (disguised as boys), imbues them with latent magical abilities and drops back in, Merlin-style, twenty years later, to tell them about it. By then the girls have grown into beautiful Playboy playmate twins, Lynette and Leigh Harris, who don't even know how hot they are or that they're girls and that they live in a world where there is no word for 'twins' so they have to be called "the two who are one" all the time. Traigon comes back too and resumes the hunt for the first born. His guards scour the land, and assault and murder the farmer family while the twins are out nude swimming. A vow of vengeance is sworn! A hearty viking Baldar (Bruno 'the Mexican shorter John Goodman' Rey) and a horny satyr (who baas like a sheep) sign on for the ride. During a remarkably large scale market town square scene they meet up with Roberto (taller Roger Daltrey) Nelson as lusty roustabout Erlick, and launch a market-wide donnybrook; the twins do a pretty good job as a kind of tag team bo staff whirligig and the size of the village and extras cast is impressive. Ensuing are 'surprises in store' for the two who are one', not just birds-bees discoveries, but hair-raising escapes, magical spells, fights, god-wars, apes with druggy fruits (if you'll forgive the expression), remote orgasms (the girls are linked psychically), and undead warriors culled from their crypts. Erlick has his own problems too, including a near-impalement the original style of the word (slowly sliding down a greased pole towards a sharpened stick aimed up your arse and bound to pop out the top of your head).

Long unavailable in any format, SORCERESS is now with me forever! I love it! It has just enough of Hill's dry Hawksian wit to stand apart from other sword and sorcery "epics" of the 'shot in Mexico or Argentina' New World post-CONAN era. With its score lifted bravely from BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, and a cast of strong women (though for me the most exciting and charismatic is Manríquez as their mother--who dies the prologue). The script is serviceable --occasionally wry, the monsters hilarious, the injury slight, the humor always well inside the boundary between dry deadpan wit (ala Big Trouble in Little China) and self-aware camp (never lapsing into Fred Olen Ray territory), and the lighting of the night and underground scenes is superb --it looks especially great on this Blu-ray - all burnished golds and charismatic highlights).

Pros: One of the lead guards has a crazy helmet that seems lifted from the 1936 FLASH GORDON. There's also a genuinely spooky crypt scene where the vertical dead in rows of alcoves slowly shamble to life out of the darkness. Baldar's a great wingman. The twins are real (in all senses); the little ape monster masks have facial movements; the satyr leads a charge of real sheep at the climax; and the effects are all of the charming 'painted on the celluloid' variety. CGI was still ten years away; the tactile earthy effort of it all--its solid mythic arc and florid array of weridness--floats past its limits. Didn't all the best Hills? And most were so very good...

Cons: It's sad to learn this was Hill's last movie, mainly because he got in an "enough is enough" spat with Corman over the editing. Why couldn't Hill have just let Corman cut the movie up? Corman's judgement has always been--to my mind--pretty solid. Why did Hill have to raise a ruckus which caused a falling out? Hill's needing to look elsewhere to make his movies led to... no more movies? To all out detriment and loss.

But I understand, home video was changing the landscape. I ain't the same anymore either. Age and experience brings wisdom at the expense of exuberance. And Spielberg was coming along to make decadent deadpan larks like this -- too dirty and weird for the young kids and too cheap for the adults-- left to lurch along solely with the 16-20 year-old males at the video rental store looking for a post-Conan fix. Still, there were many more films in this style for New World to come, and a good number of them are pretty great, I think (like the first two Deathstalker movies), full of the wondrously paradoxical Corman mix of feminist empowerment and bared breasts, dry wit, camp and inside jokes, we crave when relaxing in a late Saturday afternoon or five AM Sunday morning stupor. Sorceress's release year (1982) was a high point for A-list sci-fi and horror/adventure, and amidst that year's B-list, Hill could have rocked out for at least a few more classics. Damn you, Traigon! At any rate, long unseen in any format, SORCERESS is-- finally, thanks to Scorpion's gorgeous Blu-ray (replete with detailed extras)--made eternal. We are blessed twicefold, for the reds (of Traigon's cape especially) glow gorgeous and the black lunge deep - when those corpses emerge from the thick cobwebs of the crypt into the torchlight, it's really a high point in all of the New World post-Conan canon.

CONCLUSION

So in short, to answer my question from part 1, does Jack Hill 'get' women, the answer is clear: fuck you for asking!

Sorry, all that violence has me snappy and so does the state of the nation, and higher-educations habit of the back part of a movement lynching its own vanguard in its zeal. We must realize too the era involved, and the 'wave' motion of feminism. Hill's women are from the second wave when it was called 'women's lib' and involved a certain amount of sexy strutting and sensual freedom that would now be considered a male-imposed fantasy. But now is a mighty buzzkill place. The third wave's dour sense of sulky humorless privilege still hasn't found a very cinematic alternative, other than preachy documentaries and the kind of amateurish avant-garde downers seen mainly at museum and university talks. The difference is like an air conditioned hang-out with fun and clean if impressionable undergrads vs. a sweltering administrative office full of self-righteous grad students who consider deodorant and air conditioning to be toxic. Maybe they are right, man, but that don't make it fun to be around them. And maybe that's why no one is, unless they need to be for a grade or a tenure recommendation.

Oh shit I'm becoming the very critic I was just critiquing, I've been beaten into a coma by my own copy of Sexual Personae. Actually, I never did read anything bad about the Hill oeuvre. Unless I wrote it about Foxy Brown. Still, I haven't watched Foxy since that bad experience in '99. Why would I? I'll just watch Switchblade Sisters for the dozenth time, or Corman and Angie's Big-Bad Mama, or The Lady in Red, by Lewis Teague and John Sayles, all celebrations of badass women who 'tag ya back' in ways unthinkable in today's noxious clime. We can either glumly point out they were made by men or we can act like the women in them and take out the trash, figuratively, and throw it all over the floor and tell the men to clean it up literally! Up (with) the Hill!

Let the games of spider begin, and let Robbie Lee, Jill Banner, Beveryly Washburn, Adele Rein, Joanne Nail, Lynette and Leigh Harris, Mae Mercer, and ---oh yeah, PAM GRIER...and all the rest, run into the blazing light of eternal replay.

PS, Beware a movie with Linda Blair directed by the semi-odious Jim Wynorski--also called Sorceress, from 1987-- it sounds awful, though I do love that he just reused a title on which he already had credit (the 'original' story of Sorcreress). Had he forgotten? Does he just love that word? Jim, if you're listening, you're a dog, sir. A dog! PS - Loved Deathstalker 2!

I went to elementary school with this kid whose dad owned a racing shop/garage in Corpus Christi. He was always getting rides to school in hot rods or corvettes that his dad was flipping, and we were all jealous, but cool with it, like, at least somebody is getting to ride in these badass cars. The morning after Starsky and Hutch premiered, his dad drove him to school in a replica hot rod Red Gran Torino, same stripe, same mags. He gets out smiling, walking towards the rest of us, and we were all, Fuck You, Pal. He and his "cool" dad way overplayed their hand, went from comfortable showoff surrogate to Being Better Than Us in one cocky move. The show was another funky Super Nixon Cops non PI show, but I still love that car.

Rejoice!

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ACIDEMIC FILMS: THE LACAN HOUR (2004)

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